he lay eye.

We went down the steps to tiffin, and a half-formed resolve was shaping
itself in my heart the while. Burma was a very nice place, but they eat
_gnapi_ there, and there were smells, and after all, the girls weren't
so pretty as some others--

"You must take off your boots," said Y-Tokai.

I assure you there is no dignity in sitting down on the steps of a
tea-house and struggling with muddy boots. And it is impossible to be
polite in your stockinged feet when the floor under you is as smooth as
glass and a pretty girl wants to know where you would like tiffin. Take
at least one pair of beautiful socks with you when you come this way.
Get them made of embroidered _sambhur_ skin, of silk if you like; but do
not stand as I did in cheap striped brown things with a darn at the
heel, and try to talk to a tea-girl.

They led us--three of them and all fresh and pretty--into a room
furnished with a golden-brown bearskin. The _tokonoma_, recess
aforementioned, held one scroll-picture of bats wheeling in the
twilight, a bamboo flower-holder, and yellow flowers. The ceiling was of
panelled wood, with the exception of one strip at the side nearest the
window, and this was made of plaited shavings of cedar-wood, marked off
from the rest of the ceiling by a wine-brown bamboo so polished that it
might have been lacquered. A touch of the hand sent one side of the room
flying back, and we entered a really large room with another _tokonoma_
framed on one side by eight or ten feet of an unknown wood, bearing the
same grain as a Penang lawyer, and above by a stick of unbarked tree set
there purely because it was curiously mottled. In this second _tokonoma_
was a pearl-grey vase, and that was all. Two sides of the room were of
oiled paper, and the joints of the beams were covered by the brazen
images of crabs, half life-size. Save for the sill of the _tokonoma_,
which was black lacquer, every inch of wood in the place was natural
grain without flaw. Outside was the garden, fringed with a hedge of
dwarf-pines and adorned with a tiny pond, water-smoothed stones sunk in
the soil, and a blossoming cherry tree.

They left us alone in this paradise of cleanliness and beauty, and being
only a shameless Englishman without his boots--a white man is always
degraded when he goes barefoot--I wandered round the wall, trying all
the screens. It was only when I stooped to examine the sunk catch of a
screen that I saw it was a plaque of inl